What’s that sound you hear skittering across the screen during the garish 131 minutes of Savages? Oliver Stone’s remaining marbles. His recent trilogy of movies beginning with Dubya – World Trade Center, W., Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps ­– may have been weird and graceless in different degrees, but none reached the instantly appalling level of this.

“My real name’s Ophelia,” Blake Lively tells us in her hilariously overwritten voiceover, “but when I found out she was the bipolar bitch in Hamlet, I cut it down to just O.” O lives in a Malibu beach house and has two boyfriends, Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and Ben (Aaron Johnson), who distribute a highly profitable strain of pot. She tends to alternate sleeping with the boys, depending on what she’s in the mood for: “Chon is cold metal, Ben is warm wood.” Occasionally they get high together and go all in, forming the threesome equivalent of an IKEA shelving unit.

Paradise is lost when Chon and Ben run foul of Salma Hayek’s Baja drug cartel, and O is held hostage. In this movie, Baja drug cartels are managed, glamly, by Salma Hayek. Benicio Del Toro is her slimy henchman, who at one point licks Lively’s spittle off his fingers. Poor Demián Bichir is a dodgy lawyer. They have the look of actors with mortgages. At the centre of things, Kitsch’s monotonously gruff machismo and Johnson’s shifty overacting work in concert to produce a perfect charisma vacuum. When the movie appears to end, abruptly rewinds, and sets about giving us an even duller ending, grown critics were nearly sobbing in dismay, cheated out of a longed-for escape. If Stone wanted to make even Tony Scott’s lousiest movies look like masterworks, he’s gone about it brilliantly.